It is desirable to have a consistent and responsive frame-rate for software applications, especially graphics intensive applications, such as video games and applications utilizing 3D graphics. This is particularly important in real-time 3D video games and applications. 3D graphics software that is designed to run on high-end graphics processing (GPU) hardware (requiring intensive graphics processing from the GPU hardware) will often run poorly on low-end GPU hardware, resulting in an undesirable frame-rate slowdown. This frame-rate slowdown will be exacerbated when the GPU hardware needs to deliver stereoscopic display data with left and right display images for stereoscopic 3D viewing. Such applications will run roughly twice as slow in a stereoscopic mode because the amount of work the GPU hardware has to perform is doubled. Such reduced frame rates may lead to imagery that appears to be jerky and visually unappealing.
Attempts to overcome these limitations include presenting users with a selected number of predefined resolutions that a particular GPU is able to render to. These selectable resolutions usually follow standard display resolutions and do not have the necessary range and granularity needed to run on a variety of GPUs. A user would need to guess at an optimal resolution given a particular game/application and device capabilities. In addition, the optimal resolution may change from frame to frame, depending on what is being rendered by the GPU. Lastly, selecting a different one of the selectable standard display resolutions requires a user to pause a currently running application to make the selection.